Crowdsourcing for Human Rights

Last month, when Areej Kouki was watching news images of refugees from the Middle East walking across Europe, she resolved to do something to help. Two years earlier her family had fled the civil war in Syria. Her father and brother made the treacherous crossing from Turkey to Greece by boat and then made their way to Sweden. Now Kouki, 20, was studying dentistry in Berlin, and was moved by the stories of others seeking safety in similar journeys. But what could one person do?

She found answers on a site called Movements.org, a crowdsourcing human-rights platform started last year to enable human-rights activists and people seeking protection from dictatorships to find people with the skills to help. Through those connections, Movements.org provides opportunities to ease the suffering and amplify the voices of people who stand up to, or try to escape, the world’s most oppressive regimes. “It’s surprising it hasn’t been done before,” commented Carl Gershman, the president of the National Endowment for Democracy. “If it can be done right in a secure way it can be extremely valuable.”

On the platform, Kouki offered help with translation, writing and other needs for refugees who had arrived in the Berlin area. At the time, the refugees’ most urgent requests were for food and water, painkillers, blankets and diapers. But many also needed translation help and assistance navigating social services. Kouki and some friends purchased the necessary items and brought them to the refugees in a park in the Alt-Moabit area of Berlin. “Next weekend, six of us, Syrians and Germans, are going again to the park to see what else they need,” she said.

Movements.org was founded in 2007 to provide support to digital human-rights activists. In 2012, with a grant from Google, it was taken over by Advancing Human Rights, a New York-based group established by Robert Bernstein, the founder of Human Rights Watch, and David Keyes, a pioneer in online human-rights activism. Last year, they reintroduced it as a crowdsourcing platform. Over the past year, more than 250,000 people have visited the site, leading to nearly 10,000 connections between people requesting assistance and those offering it. (Some of the successful connections are listed here.)

“Most people don’t think of themselves as a human-rights activist,” says Keyes, the driving force behind the platform. (He has also brought renewed popular attention to human-rights violators through darkly satirical videos). “They look at these great struggles around the world and they feel at a loss. What is any one person going to do against ISIS?” But when he gives a talk, he said, he usually ends up surrounded by people who ask, “What can I do to help?”

That question helped him to realize that the nature of the human-rights struggle had evolved, he said. “For decades, the presumption was that we needed to get information out of closed societies,” Keyes explained. “So it became vital to collect examples of brutality because you wouldn’t know about it otherwise. But now we know about the brutality of these regimes. We see it on YouTube and Twitter every day. The challenge is how to get help inside.”

“Amazon says that you don’t need to be a bookstore to sell a book and Uber says that you don’t need to be a taxi service to drive a taxi,” he added. “I realized that you don’t need to be an N.G.O. to fight a dictator, or a political leader to help a human-rights activist. Millions of people around the globe have the skills to help, and they’re currently not being utilized. If we could build a bridge between these communities, more people could be helped than we ever thought possible.”

What skills are needed? On the platform, human-rights champions regularly seek to connect with journalists, lawyers, translators, editors, writers, social media experts, coders, artists, cartoonists, musicians, cyber security gurus, public relations specialists, students and other activists. Policy makers who want to focus on human rights, including senators, parliament members and current and former ministers from the United States, Canada, Germany, Sweden, Australia, Iraq and Iran have posted on the platform, asking people to share their stories.

In recent weeks, numerous refugees from the Middle East have used Movements to contact lawyers, soliciting advice about asylum in different countries. I spoke with a Yemeni advocate for religious tolerance who had to flee his home after receiving death threats from Al Qaeda and Houthi rebels. (He requested that I remove identifying details out of concern for his family’s safety.) Through the site, he got in touch with a veteran human-rights activist in Yemen who helped him stay safe in the midst of the war. He also received legal assistance and is now living in another country, where he is seeking asylum. “Through Movements, I found myself in contact with a lot of people who wanted to help, and they gave me hope,” he told me. “This is a very good feeling while you’re in the middle of a war. Someone cares about you.”

The platform currently serves activists from closed societies with populations of more than five million, with a primary focus on countries deemed to be the largest and worst human rights offenders, including North Korea, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Egypt and Syria. Currently, a majority of posts come from the Middle East, with most users looking for ways to generate attention for causes — often to keep the names of prisoners they care about in the news, or to ensure that people who died are not forgotten. Through the platform, a friend seeking to honor the memory of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian attorney who died in police custody after investigating a $230 million tax fraud, was put in touch with musicians who wrote a song, later turned into a video featuring members of the band Pussy Riot.

Photo

A demonstration in Paris in May in support of Raif Badawi.Credit Stephane De Sakutin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Movements also has a partnership with The Daily Beast, which has been active publishing articles written about and by human rights defenders. Ensaf Haidar, the wife of Raif Badawi, a blogger in Saudi Arabia imprisoned since 2012 for allegedly disrespecting Islam, has received assistance getting articles translated and widely circulated as she fights, from exile in Canada, his sentence of 10 years and a total of 1,000 lashes in 20 weekly whippings.

The first 50 lashes were delivered in January, but further beatings have been repeatedly postponed amid an international outcry that they were likely to kill him. Nevertheless, the sentence itself was upheld in June by Saudi Arabia’s Supreme Court.

The renowned Canadian human-rights lawyer Irwin Cotler, who served as counsel to Nelson Mandela, Andrei Sakharov and Natan Sharansky, has taken up Badawi’s case. Last month, Haidar announced in Montreal the formation of a foundation named after Badawi that supports free expression internationally. And her activism has continued to build awareness. “The articles from human rights activists from Saudi Arabia led to a lot of people there forming online groups,” said Faisal Saeed al-Mutar, an Iraqi born human-rights activist and writer who received asylum in the United States and now advances Movements.org’s efforts to help liberal dissidents.

Another big need is technology, says Ahed al-Hindi, a Syrian who was imprisoned for his defense of political prisoners and now lives in the United States, where he runs Movements’ Arabic program. “Many activists want to know how to browse the Internet securely without being in trouble with the government censors,” he said. “We weren’t very smart using the Internet. The regime was able to find us.”

Through a partnership with SaferVPN, some Movements users are able to download free cybersecurity software with which to circumvent censorship and surveillance. The platform is designed with security in mind. And users receive trust ratings of one to five stars based on how thoroughly their identity can be verified. Still, users are warned to be cautious about posting personally identifying information, since government agents can pose as human rights defenders.

Related

It’s hard to appreciate the value of many of these small actions against huge systems of oppression. But authoritarian regimes count on people’s indifference and short memories. That’s why Keyes was disturbed in April when Mohammad Javad Zarif, the foreign minister of Iran, spoke at New York University and not a single student showed up to protest the country’s appalling human-rights record. “It’s a missed opportunity to raise the price on dictatorship,” he said, “to ensure that they can’t just go on locking up women’s rights activists, and torturing bloggers, and murdering gay people and be treated like a normal civilized country.”

In 1997, Cotler, who later became Canada’s minister of justice and attorney general, asked Mikhail Gorbachev why he freed the dissident Natan Sharansky months after becoming leader of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev recalled his first visit to Canada in 1983, when he was the Soviet Union’s secretary of agriculture. He wanted to talk about harvests, but people kept demonstrating and accosting him about Sharansky, whom he said he hadn’t even heard of at the time. “It was costing us, it was costing us, wherever I went, politically and economically,” he told Cotler.

The lesson stuck. “It’s important to create a critical mass of advocacy,” added Cotler, who sits on the board of Advancing Human Rights. “All the steps are important. Getting a jingle written on behalf of a political prisoner, or a website, or a translation, or a journalist who will write a story, or a lawyer who will take up the case, or a remedy that will be exercised at the U.N., or a civil society involvement that might not have otherwise taken place, or a university or law school who will adopt a political prisoner. And Movements.org can play a very crucial role in the initiation, coordination and implementation of that critical mass of advocacy.”